The Secret to Superhuman Strength

By Alison Bechdel 

Mariner Books/Harper Collins, 2021

ISBN: 9780544387652

The ensō is a sacred symbol in Buddhism. The circle represents many things: life, connection, strength, the void, letting go of expectations, and the beauty in imperfection. It is a symbol of enlightenment. It is traditionally drawn using only one brushstroke as a meditative practice in letting go of the mind and allowing the body to create, as the singular brushstroke allows for no modifications.

While the artform of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength is the opposite of this elusive, one brushstroke masterpiece, it is still a masterpiece—complicated and controlled, at once a meditation on perfection and imperfection, on interconnectivity and solitude, on struggle and on bliss, on death, on life, on living. This is a deep expansion of the ideas at work in Bechdel’s other books, most notably the critically-acclaimed,  Fun Home which does at times feel like prerequisite material to Superhuman Strength. 

The memoir’s structure is presented in decades, broken into sections denoted by facing page spreads in the traditional Sumi-e style of ink painting. But between these breaths, within each decade, the reader witnesses the struggle of the comic strip, the graphic memoir, with its complicated layers of narrative, research, story arc, color, ink, and timing. It is Bechdel’s life illustrated and the inked boxes hold the anxiety that we all feel:  the panic of deadlines, of relationships abandoned for work, of bodies growing older, and of the people (and pets) around us dying. 

Maybe at the outset of this memoir, Bechdel thought innocently, that this would be about her lifelong obsession with fitness and the empowerment that comes with physical strength, especially for a queer woman born in that cusp between the Boomers and Gen X. Indeed the narrative takes us through her introduction to skiing as a child, the freedom of running before that ever was a thing, and to karate as a first plunge into the community of women and the allure of violence and self-reliance. From there she shares with the reader her devotion to yoga, then cycling, and then back to cross-country skiing, and finally running again.  And there is our first glimpse of the ensō: a lifelong struggle to find the thing, only to find it at the beginning. Bechel has arrived, naturally where she truly begins: running.

But there is more at work here. Bechdel also calls on the Romantics, specifically Coleridge and Wordsworth, as the first Western poets to implore us to look to nature for solace and connection to the universe. She brings the researched thread of these works and ideas to the Transcendentalists, Emerson, Thoreau, and specifically Margaret Fuller, which in turn provide the Beats, namely Gary Synder and Jack Kerouac, their material and inspiration. (There is also a beautiful and poignant connection made to Adrienne Rich—Transcendental Etude—that is perfectly timed, like a meditation chime, throughout the text.) These very real people from our literary past become Bechdel’s (and therein the readers’) bodhisattvas on this journey. And this too is a sort of circumambulation: Bechdel exercising her devotion to these men and women of thought and poetry. With painstaking care, she weaves this history and illustrates their quest alongside her own story. She too is cultivating her mind, repeating this history like its own sutra, so that we might know it, and return to it again and again.

Bechdel is hard at work here. The reader feels her struggle to let go. Evidence of this is penned somewhere in the 2000’s when referring to perhaps both Bechdel’s exhausting work binges and her insatiable need for physical fitness/activity, her partner at the time asks, “What if you weren’t always pushing yourself? What are you afraid would happen?” To which Bechdel responds, “ Uhhh. I wouldn’t deserve to exist.” For any woman I know, this is an all too close to home, and eerily universal admission.

And then, a break(through). In the last quarter of the memoir, the fourth wall is broken and we see Bechdel at work on the book in our hands. This is a beautiful moment of transparency rarely felt in literature and to see it illuminated is remarkable. The effect on the reader is profound. Bechdel’s need to control the outcome is switched off, and in turn, so is the reader’s. What if the point was not to finish but to stop struggling?

Indeed, what if instead of constantly traversing the sharpened edge of the razor, we stepped off its impossible path? By asking this of herself, Bechdel is essentially challenging  her readers. What if we walk or run when we feel the need to move? What if we allow ourselves to hear that call again, like when we were children? Then we are free to listen for and trust our beginner mind and recover that innocence of a body that has not yet fallen, or been told it no longer belongs, doesn’t count, or is too fatigued by the expert mind living in its place. After all, as Bechdel says, “The only thing to transcend is the idea that there is something to transcend”.

This could very well be the secret to superhuman strength. 

MEGHAN MALONEY-VINZ was a distinguished multi-sport athlete from a small Wisconsin town. When glory days gave way to reality, she traded her cleats, ball, and racket, for poetry and parenting. Since receiving her MFA from Hamline University in 2007, Maloney-Vinz has managed several literary journals includingWater~Stone, andRunestone Review(s) and a small book arts press (broadcraft press).